I was first made aware of the film "Bunker" by the video of Penelope Cruz wiping tears from her eyes as she witnessed a standing ovation and an interview where Cruz and Javier Bardem talk about playing a married couple on screen. So great was the buzz around the film that I had to recheck whether it won any prizes – it has not.
"Bunker" opens promisingly and familiarly enough. The characters of Bardem and Cruz, the happily married couple Miguel and Sofia, are telling the story of how they met. Miguel is leading the charge and Sofia observing him. It is naturally a delight to see the close-up of both actors’ faces, real faces that have not been sculpted to look like all the other faces in Hollywood. The scene is promising also because it is almost a repeat of Sorogoyen’s "The Beloved," where Bardem’s character is speaking to his estranged daughter. In both cases, it is clear that the man Bardem plays is acting, trying to cover up his past crimes with his charm. While in "The Beloved" it turns out his crime is making life hell for his daughter’s mother, in "Bunker," we learn that it is him putting his career first and carrying his family from Madrid to London.
The first part of "Bunker" sets the scene for a perfect marriage and perfect family, which, of course, must be tested for our enjoyment. Miguel is a prize-winning architect, and so the interiors are beautiful and his study is decorated with utmost taste. Sofia works at a sleek publishing house where she expects to be promoted. They have two beautiful girls and a cat named Blue (at the London Film Festival there was another pet named Blue, a dog in "Possible Love"), which fulfills its symbolic function of representing the forces in and outside the bunker – the family’s home.
Yes, Florian Zeller, who is the writer and director of the film, wants us to understand that the bunker in the film’s title refers first and foremost to the perfect space the Moreno family have created for themselves. I was made aware that the film was a Zeller production only when the end credits rolled, and when I saw his name, things fell into place. I was uneasy about not having enjoyed a film whose actors and message were right up my alley. Zeller started his career as a playwright, and he keeps writing scripts that are for the stage, always thinking about the dark box of the theatre, and using the heightened language of the stage.
I might have been more forgiving if he kept at that theater register. But instead, he tries to open up the box to the garden, where the Morenos have their first encounter with their unruly neighbor, in the shape of a hole in their garden wall. Yes, viewers, the Morenos’ bunker has been breached, and we shall witness how they deal with it. As in the more symbolic world of the theatre, Zeller replicates this idea of in a more macrocosmic manner, with a multimillionaire asking Miguel to build him a literal bunker for the apocalypse. This, then, becomes the hole in the marriage: Miguel considering accepting the offer and Sofia trying to be his conscience to make him refuse. For gender balance, of course, we have Sofia having her own dalliance with a young writer, letting the audience know that her job also creates occasions where she may prove disloyal to her marriage.
While they have the usual married couple fights over who is neglecting who and who has sacrificed more, the neighbor who has been summoned for a talk about the breach in the wall finally rings the bell, and when Bardem and Cruz open the door, it is none other than Stephen Graham. I use the actors’ names advisedly here because up until this moment we have been watching an upper-middle-class marriage crack in its polite way, and all of a sudden we have Graham barge into this world, like some unwelcome crossover episode. I want the Morenos to close the door immediately and not let Ken Loach’s England inside. But I also savor this moment where it is the Spaniards who have priced out the English in their hometown.
We watch Miguel act all territorial about his garden and privacy, and Sofia trying to understand the needs of Toby the neighbor, who does his sucking-teeth thing and tells them about what a nice neighborhood it used to be before the rich moved in. Toby says he is opening a window on their shared wall for natural light, and the Morenos – one of them admittedly a prize-winning architect – never question why the window has to be on their shared wall rather than any other wall of Toby’s garage. "A skylight would have done the trick just as well if not better," as I heard one viewer say after the film. Zeller wants this window to be the bone of contention between the neighbors, and yes, let’s face it, Toby’s little garage is one of the bunkers in the film.
Having laid out all the points of conflict, Zeller doesn’t seem to know how to bring them to a close, and so, the theater man that he is, uses a coup de theatre that resolves all of them in a way that lets us know we can’t live in our little bunkers, and that neighbors are our safety net. The ending is not only very clean, but the "marriage saved" note it ends on feels too conservative for a Frenchman. But do I recommend you see the film? Of course I do. Two hours spent with Cruz and Bardem are two hours well spent, despite the shortcomings of Zeller’s latest offering.
